Faculty Profile

Additional Information

Dr. Irshad Hussain

Associate Professor

Department Of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering

Dr. Hussain is among the founding members of SBA School of Science & Engineering (SSE) and has played a key role to lead the development of Chemistry Department at LUMS. He is leading department of Chemistry at LUMS since 2009 that is now one of the best Chemistry departments in the region especially with reference to the placement of over 90% of the undergraduate students in the fully funded graduate programs in the world best universities including MIT, Princeton, Yale, Chicago, Cornell, Rice, UIUC, John Hopkins, University of California and University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the quality of research. Prior to joining LUMS, Dr. Hussain spearheaded research and development program in Nanobiotechnology at National Institute for Biotechnology & Genetic Engineering (NIBGE), Faisalabad, Pakistan, and developed a Nanobiotech group/facility for the synthesis of metal nanoparticles and explore their applications in biotechnology and advanced materials fabrication, which is now among the few best such facilities in Pakistan. Dr. Hussain has published ~70 research articles in prominent journals including Nature Materials, Angewandte Chemie - Int. Ed., Advanced Materials, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Small, ChemCommun, Langmuir, and Nanoscale. He has delivered several invited/keynote/plenary lectures at national and international forums to highlight the potential of nanotechnology in various disciplines with particular reference to his own research achievements in this emerging field. Dr. Hussain has developed several effective research collaborations with the leading research groups in USA, Europe, China (HUST), Saudi Arabia (KAUST) and several National Institutions in Pakistan. He has got several competitive National/International research grants to explore the applications of metal nanoparticles/ nanoclusters in Chemical/Biomedical Sciences and Renewable Energy Technologies. Notably, Dr. Hussain has got highly competitive Pak-US collaborative research grant (~600,000 USD) funded by HEC and US National Academy of Sciences, Pak-German collaborative research grant (~50,000 Euro) funded by DAAD, Germany, and EPSRC global fund (92,000 GBP) funded by EPSRC-UK. These projects are in collaboration with Prof. Vincent M. Rotello at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA, Prof. Wolfgang J. Parak at the Philipps University, Marburg, and Prof. Antonis G. Kanaras at the University of Southampton, UK, respectively and are meant to explore the applications of functional nanomaterials in bacteria detection, bio-imaging/bio-sensing, catalysis and multidrug resistance. In addition, more recently Dr. Hussain has also got 02 more research grants in collaboration with US-Pakistan Center for Advanced Studies in Energy (USPCAS-E) at the University of Engineering & Technology (UET), Peshawar, to explore the applications of nanomaterials in solar cells and fuel cells that are funded by KPK provincial Govt. and USAID respectively.

In 2007, Dr. Hussain was awarded a Professor Atta-ur-Rehman Gold Medal/Prize in chemistry and more recently (2014) he is also awarded Gold Medal in Chemistry by Pakistan Academy of Sciences to acknowledge his achievements in the field of Chemistry. Dr. Hussain is also the Fellow of the Chemical Society of Pakistan and has served as the Chair of National Nanotech Foresight Committee constituted by Pakistan Council for Science & Technology (PCST) in 2014. Recently Dr. Hussain was also awarded Charles Wallace visiting fellowship to visit the University of Cambridge, UK, in Summer 2016 to develop linkages.